#80: Robbed

Oh shit, Peter thinks the moment he walks in. Their belongings, everything they own, everything they just unpacked from borrowed boxes, are now strewn all over the place. The couch, Grace's couch, the one her parents gave her, gave them, was on its side.

He images the robber rummaging through the brand new couch searching for those coins that had yet to fall out of pockets into the crooks and crannies of the couch, never to be seen again, unless you were desperate to scrounge up the loose change to pay the pizza delivery guy.

A gust of wind slams the front door out from his tentative grip, and it bangs loudly.

From behind the couch, he hears Grace. She's injured, he thinks. The sound was of her regaining consciousness and he imagines the pool of blood caking in her hair.

Miraculously, her head pops up from behind the couch like a jack-in-the-box, bloodless but dishevelled.

"You frightened me," she says, breathless.

"Are you okay?" he says. He realises how useless that statement is while he remains anchored to the hallway, a mere spectator to the carnage of their lounge room.

"No," she says in her sing-song voice. "This bloody couch." She stands with some sort of tool in her hand.

"I don't understand."

"Not all it arrived last week. We now have this other piece, making it bigger than we thought. So, I've been trying to," she sweeps her hand across the devastation.

Peter follows her hand, not seeing the connection between the mess and the additional part.

"Well, I realised it needed to move to over there, otherwise the whole thing wouldn't work. And so I began moving stuff, but then needed to move other stuff, and then thought, I needed to make this first."

"What about not using it? And leaving things the way they were?"

"But I wanted to surprise you."

"Surprise isn't the word. I thought we'd been robbed."